Erdogan sets values-based agenda for Turkey

Oct 11, 2011

Konstantin von Eggert

Konstantin von Eggert discusses Prime Minister Erdogan’s role in making Turkey a stronger player on the international arena

There is hardly a day when Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, is not doing something that grabs
the attention of the media worldwide. He preaches democracy to the Egyptians,
threatens Israel with naval action, promises the Palestinians to recognize
their as yet non-existent state and declares publicly that he is no longer on
speaking terms with Syria’s not-so-strong-man Bashar al-Assad. In a recent
interview to “Time” magazine the Turkish PM mentioned his country’s
long-standing official bid to join the European Union only by passing. He
hinted that by the time the Europeans are ready to accept Turkey as one of
their own, it might well become a much less accommodating and more demanding
partner.

And why not? Erdogan and his team possess a
vision for Turkey which, although still a work in progress, is much more
coherent, inspired and whole than anything the current EU leaders, uniform,
dull and indecisive as one, could ever suggest to their own people. This is a
prospect of a country that sincerely espouses Islam and is at the same time
comfortable with other faiths, opinions and mores. Erdogan’s agenda is
values-based – and this makes it infinitely more interesting and exciting than
anything the EU has to offer, even if you disagree with the values themselves.
In all earnestness, if you were a young Turk (no pun intended), which of the
two “projects” for your country you’d rather fall for - spreading influence,
political and economic, in the Mediterranean, and making its own decisions
about the future? Or joining a large club of disparate nations trying in vain
to bail out a state with the population the size of Istanbul, and at the same
time feeding a sprawling Brussels bureaucracy aspiring to dictate the shape of
eggs to the farmers of Denmark and regulate alcohol sales to the indigenous
peoples of Lappland in Finland? The answer is somewhat obvious.

That Turkey’s strict secularist system,
guaranteed and upheld by the military was out of step with the changing times,
was clear even before the former mayor of Istanbul burst onto the national
political scene in the 1990s. But it is also obvious that the old secular,
Ataturk-worshipping elite missed this point. And now Erdogan’s “Justice and
Development” has ceased the momentum. In the words of a friend of mine, a
professor of political science at one of Turkey’s leading private universities,
“the prime minister is using democratic slogans to change the system so as to
enshrine the Islamists’ leading position in Turkish politics for years, if not
decades to come”. Erdogan conducts an unrelenting witch-hunt against the military
– and gets applause from the EU for removing the “peaked caps” from politics.
Unexciting and sometimes nasty the generals kept the radicals of all hues out
of politics. Will they be still kept on the fringes? There is a legitimate
doubt about this. Erdogan calls for direct elections of the president,
preparing to slip into the head of state chair in order to continue his
political career well into the future. But what should worry everyone most is
his persecution of journalists (several dozen are in jail, frequently on flimsy
or obviously constructed charges). He also stuffs the judiciary with the
“Justice and Development” party sympathisers. All this makes Erdogan’s
protestations of his commitment to democracy not very convincing.

His foreign policy looks erratic and prone
to sloganeering at best, reckless at worst. Looking at the footage of his
triumphant tour of the Middle East I could not help but compare it to the
documentary reels of Gamal Abdel Nasser working the crowds into frenzy by his
fiery appeals to “drive Israel into the sea”. Of course, Erdogan says no such
thing. He knows that there are red lines one should not cross as long as one
wants to be taken seriously by the West.

Still the Turkish PM’s taste for populism
and popular adulation is a cause for worry. At the same time, one has to give
it to him – he knows where to stop. Erdogan went back on his own promise to
visit the Hamas-run Gaza strip in solidarity with the Palestinians, although
the Egyptian authorities were ready to open the border for him. He recently
duly deployed US radars on Turkish soil in compliance with NATO obligations. So
the jury on the maverick Turkish leader’s future is still out. He might well
become a great reformer, who’d influence not only his native country but also
Muslim societies around the world. However he may also turn out to be a power
hungry politician who would ruin Turkish democracy and destabilize the
Mediterranean.